(urth) _Edges_ shows "Suzanne Delage" involves memory loss; SD is probably Bram Stoker's _Dracula_

[Gwern Branwen]

I've rewritten https://gwern.net/suzanne-delage to cover the new
_Edges_ material and elaborate on the _Dracula_ interpretation. Some
of the additions are covered below.

On Sun, Aug 27, 2023 at 1:50 PM Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com> wrote:
> Interesting, but I don't see why the interpretations of anthologists
> should be considered 'word of God', or interpreted literally.

This isn't an 'anthologist', this is Virginia Kidd. Who in the world
would be better suited to know what Gene Wolfe meant by the story than
his long-time editor who he liked & would turn into a character in a
novel, and who commissioned the story from him for her anthology and
had to write an introduction (and a blurb) explaining it, however
cryptically?

> If the
> narrator didn't meet Suzanne, his potential sweetheart, she is in a
> sense forever lost in time.

But in the more relevant senses, she's not lost at all. She's right
there in town. He's already divorced (twice). Given their age, they
could totally get back together into a relationship. Heck, they could
even have kids. (The daughter is said to be 15; if Suzanne married
shortly after graduating highschool, as would be expected for that
time period and in absence of her going on to higher education,
Suzanne would be something like 18 + 15 = 33yo.  Even tacking on
another half decade or more...)

> The vampire version does have the advantage that something happened to
> the narrator in a positive rather than a negative sense.  In this she
> was his actual sweetheart rather than the one that was meant to be.  But
> this seems its only advantage.

No, it has many advantages I've laid out.

> And the fact is that vampires are never
> mentioned at all or even really hinted at in the story - isn't this a
> little over-subtle even for Wolfe?

That's also not true. The vampire interpretation was always the
leading interpretation for SD, because, quite aside from external
evidence like 'den of iniquities' or Wolfe loving to put vampires
everywhere so vampires are *always* an option in a Wolfe fic, the
story has so many strikingly vampiric elements jammed into it: women
who return from mysterious trips to ancient mansions mysteriously
exhausted but then gradually recover and become eager to go back; a
Bride of Dracula-esque young girl whose appearance could not be more
vampiric without mentioning fangs; odd mental gaps and lacuna; a
bizarre absence of *photographs*; the wizened old crone who hates the
possibly-vampiric woman...

For Wolfe, I'd have to say that this is actually quite blatant
hint-dropping compared to some of the things he's confirmed in the
past (especially considering the size & style of the story). And while
I and others have criticized Wolfe for having a poor understanding of
what hints readers will and will not get, and often setting up puzzles
which require a truly improbable level of reading-Wolfe's-mind
(verging on the level of the crackbrained logic of old text adventure
games), I think this is not such a case.

The _Dracula_ reading is so transparent once you think of it that I'm
now a bit puzzled that no one ever solved it before. It's certainly
not an obscure novel. Perhaps it's too difficult to recall _Dracula_
because our memories of it are overwritten by later fiction like
_Nosferatu_ or Bela Lugosi; sort of like the difficulty people have
with _Doctor Frankenstein_ or _Moby-Dick_ or _The Wizard of Oz_ - the
original is so overshadowed by all its adaptations that it's hard to
see what is right there in plain sight when you read it (
https://gwern.net/story-of-your-life#fn2 ).

It's just that no one could ever give a sensible explanation of how it
all added up to (what was going on with the mother, what was going on
with Delage and the daughter, are they the same person or separate,
are they both vampires or just one is a vampire) or where the package
of 'can't be photographed' + 'mind control powers' + 'can go out in
daylight' comes from etc. So it was ad hoc and circular, and at best,
the beginning of an interpretation. Extremely unsatisfying, and merely
the least bad theory we had.

However, once you say 'it's Bram Stoker's _Dracula_', all of that
instantly snaps into place and it's marvelous to see how Wolfe drops
in detail after detail pointing to the inversion of _Dracula_ as the
skeleton key. It is indeed a carefully constructed puzzle box.

To give even more examples: on Reddit ConsistentPause4083
(https://www.reddit.com/r/genewolfe/comments/161l2b3/new_suzanne_delage_theory_its_based_on_bram/)
helpfully points out that I'm wrong about Delage being only cursed
(partially a vampire) in order to explain how she's appearing in
daylight at the end without burning to a crisp - because *Bram
Stoker's vampires* are completely immune to daylight!
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Dracula#Limitations_of_his_powers)
It's later vampire fiction which prefers the burn-to-a-crisp weakness.
(It is a good interpretation indeed where your mistakes turn out to
strengthen it.)

Or consider the odd mention of a railroad. Why does the narrator
bother to specify that the mothers went on a trip 'once or twice' by
railroad? Seems like a waste of space, at best a red herring; and all
theories previously just ignore it, no one tries to tie in railroads
or explain how cloning or "Snow White" could be related. But guess
what Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ - uniquely among vampire fiction - is
full of? Railroads.*

Or how about the apparent stasis of the town? Points right back to the
_Dracula_ theme of Dracula being the enemy of humanity & progress, and
blighting the region he rules.

Or why do the old woman & Delage's mother seem to disappear with the
narrator unable to remember what happened to them? Most of the
theories can't or don't, but it's easily explained if they are killed
by the vampire and would-be vampire hunters respectively, trading
blows.

Or how about the odd mention of 'a certain fundamentalist church'? Why
did Wolfe, a Catholic, drop that in when churches, religions,
Protestantism, Protestant fundamentalism etc are never mentioned again
and appear completely irrelevant to everything in the story; and why
not instead drop in an allusion to his preferred religion? Well,
because as an inversion of _Dracula_, where Catholic vampire hunters
are victorious over Dracula by using superior Catholic Christian
apparatus like consecrated Eucharists (which Catholic readers have
always enjoyed in _Dracula_), there must be Protestant vampire hunters
who are defeated by the vampire because they trusted in the power of
an inferior Christianity. So Wolfe gets to subtly take a shot at the
heretics.

* railroads/timekeeping/technology/progress in _Dracula_ turns out to
be a whole topic of its own:
https://gwern.net/doc/economics/2014-robbins.pdf
https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/turning-back-the-economic-clock
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/bram-stoker-dracula-and-progress-studies.html

-- 
gwern